Drawing pictures on the screen during the playing of a video game is a highly math intensive procedure which can potentially overburden even the best and fastest processors on the market today. Generally, the more animated objects that are on a game screen, the more the game action tends to slow down as processors strive to perform the necessary calculations. Indeed, many manufacturers have given up on the idea of solving this problem by software methods and are providing games which require advanced video chipsets and/or advanced processors in order to perform the necessary calculations.
Conventionally, characters are stored as a plurality of connected polygons. This places certain restrictions on their use. For example, since the resolution of the character is set by the relative size and quantity of such polygons, the resolution can be optimized only for a particular view. For example, a character that looks fine at a distance can be quite unacceptable close up in that the polygon structure will be too course with the individual polygons being distractingly noticeable. This problem can be partially alleviated by storing several versions of a character, each to be used at an appropriate distance, but this is not an ideal solution. Firstly, storing several versions of a character takes up much needed memory, and secondly there may be a noticeable jump while the character is moving in and out of the screen as the version is switched.
Another of the problems associated with the prior art methods is that realistic movement of characters is not possible, since the form of the individual polygons is fixed.
It would be advantageous to have a method for solving these and other related problems, and for reducing the number of calculations required in real time and/or for adapting the quantity of calculations required as the need arises. To the inventor's knowledge, no such method has existed in the prior art. The fact that game producers have voluntarily limited their markets by making their games playable only on machines equipped in a particular manner strongly indicates that it has, heretofore, been thought that games and other graphic displays having a great quantity of real time generated animation inevitably require an onerous quantity of real time calculations.